As enthusiastic as I remain about the overall premise of equity replacements issued on cryptographically secure ledgers (including Etheruem, which I started with by running the educational channel Ethercasts), I don't see anything in this presentation that indicates that the massive challenges regarding nation-state regulation have been solved.
Even were one to go on the premise that one can effectively run this in a sandbox away from standard nation-state regulation, one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?
This and related effects caused ~2 years of delays in my own implementation.
I'll note I remain optimistic and positive about all related efforts in this field.
Isn't this sort of a "solved" question, in the sense that we know there's only so much a computer can do? The practical answers are, of course, reputation systems and incentivization systems like escrow. Both of those are areas of active research.
I thought the point of crypto-contracts was to make enforcement as automatic as possible...if that is not fully true, are there any neutral verifications services that can hold things in escrow?
Sovereign sanctioning and alot of capital
SEC hasn't challenged it yet though but I mean, you can be rich and bring your project to the world.
We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.
Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).
Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).
Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.
How?
How does Aragon eliminate the IRS or DIAN if you are doing business in America or Colombia, respectively?
How does it eliminate regulations on interstate and international commerce?
What companies would actually use this to run their verses say Quickbooks, right now?
What companies have been built on Ethereum so far and how have the principals done with regard to taxes and tariffs?
You can replace every intermediary with a more efficient and fair decentralized solution.
How?
Decentralized solutions by their nature are less efficient than centralized solutions.
One of the most basic needs in humans’ lives is to transact. Create products, provide services, sell them to others. Add value to their lives. The market.
It’s the core of everything we do, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. The market system is how we live.
What does this mean? It sounds like something you'd hear on Silicon Valley. Very rah-rah but where's the substance?
I feel like this is a cool technical solution that is not realizing that the real issue is social and bureaucratic. The way they are pitching themselves doesn't give me faith that they have a solid plan. Hopefully that's not unfair.
EDIT: Nevermind, I see in an another comment that you're using Solidity. Thanks for the answer!
Now I have a new question. What do you think about the claim that, "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." (http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
The max-callstack issue isn't a problem anymore due to a change in the EVM.
TheDAO was hit with a reentrant call. It's pretty easy to avoid that class of bugs by either (1) putting any external calls (including ether transfers) after all state changes, or (2) using address.send instead of address.call.value. Also, TheDAO was a very convoluted contract; better coding practices help a lot. Any contract that's at all hard to understand is a huge red flag for me.
Solidity may not be a perfect language but it's rapidly improving, statically typed, and has a set of best practices which are fairly well known at this point. The current alternatives aren't nearly as well tested or reviewed, and don't have clear advantages anyway.
There are various experimental projects for more advanced functional-style languages but they're not ready yet. There's also someone at the Foundation working full-time on formal proof systems.
That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now.
To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.
I'd probably be willing to use this for a side project, but I feel like the prospect of saving even a substantial amount of legal fees isn't enough to risk everything on a new technology that would be a full-time job to actually understand.
That's not to say it's not a good idea, because it is a good idea, but there's a really big lift in terms of getting mainstream adoption.
The fact that they called it a hack when it explicitly followed the Ethereum guidelines calls into doubt the sincerity of the people behind Ethereum.
http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/
If people want to actually have malleable contracts in the case of fraud, the courts provide a much more accountable process that has had centuries of fine tuning.
Random plug for non Turing complete smart contact systems like Decred.
(I don't own any decred, nor am I part of the team, I just idle in IRC.)
It's so disruptive even the creators choose to use the old "outdated" way it claims to be solving.
If you don't eat your own dog food it means you don't have confidence in it. So why push the garbage on to somebody else who will take all the risks?
How the heck does this make frontpage?
Even if it does become more stable in the future, they haven't made the case that this is well suited for all businesses. It is designed to enable cooperation between stakeholders; a company with one major stakeholder has little need for it.
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
It's even possible that some day we see a unicorn startup with a solo developer.
I also believe that some of the tools these guys are building can be very useful for conventional companies too. There's a whole lot of bureaucracy and inefficiency in running a company.
See eShares and his elegant and simple solution for cap management. I believe there are many other areas in which similar improvements can be made, and software needed to run a blockchain company could also be used to improve procedures at conventional companies.
Ethereum proved that automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention.
The world is moving towards more automated systems, the fact that there was one mistake at a given point in time doesn't mean anything.
By mistake I mean putting so much money on an unproved experiment.
We build on top of them and all our contracts will be throughly audited before going into production
Says so much with so little.
So if someone installs malware on your laptop, they get to own your shares forever? Living dangerously, man!
Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/caution-scammers-can-steal-yo...
Just as Bitcoin lovers are learning the hard way why we have banking regulations, so are Ethereum followers learning the hard way why we have courts.
I'd like to just keep up with the project. Is this intentional or is there another way to join the mailing list?
1. semantic-ui.com
No, it gives insight into what has been done in Ethereum using the accounts tied to this "company". If investors are led to believe that this gives perfect clarity, that makes defrauding investors trivially easy by simply keeping things outside of what gets recorded. Keeping multiple books is the oldest trick in the book.
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
Why can't a regular company do that? Blockchian payments are really the very least of your problems if you are trying to create a profitable self-driving car company.
What benefit does it offer other than being cool?
Laws do not magically vanish when something goes into a blockchain.
Also, all it takes is one lawsuit from an angry customer to pull back the veil on the ethereum libertopia, free of taxation and regulation, you've created.
One the other hand, the Ethereum Name Service should be going live before long, and within the next year or so it should also have Swarm (distributed data storage) and Whisper (secure messaging) live as well, both integrated into Ethereum. The ultimate goal is that you wan't need web hosting.
already possible. this allows you to create a ZERO person startup. you can be a contractor to a software algo.
It doesn't matter how much auditing is done, if you're building on a shaky foundation mistakes will eventually slip through. Solidity is definitely a shaky foundation.
I really admire projects like yours for their daring, but that needs to be backed up with hard engineering work. I would hate to see smart contracts go down the path of the "Internet of things" -- finally succeeding only to cause more harm than good due to compounding security vulnerabilities.
Why would anyone expose themselves to more risks by using Aragon?
Why decentralize and create more problems when everybody has been using centralized systems without issues over the past few centuries?
What problem is it that you are solving with Aragon? I don't see one.
Better yet, are you running Aragon to run your company? This question has come up multiple times in the comments with no response. It's pretty telling.
Any founder with a legit business who shows his project to Hacker News and gets ~40 some odd people to comment on it would almost certainly want to keep up that conversation.
I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise that have user-friendly account recovery tools. Due to the plug-and-play architecture of blockchains, that sort of thing will work automatically without any need for organizations like Aragon to integrate with them.
They have incentive to do that, because their work becomes worthless if ETH were to lose value because that kind of theft would destroy user confidence in the cryptocurrency.
I think the rest of the world would call that state of affairs a 'bubble'.
Guess what, they're not going to accept "we can't" as a valid answer.
Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.
You cannot perfectly link a real world item to a digital asset without losing the 'trust-free' nature of cryptocoins. You always end up having to trust someone. And once you do that, you've lost all of the advantages of the digital asset.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
If you own 1 EthUSD, there is a warranty that someone will give you 1 USD for that token
And a car sharing scheme would need physical cars, making it pretty easy to take down the system or haul the car owners to court if the service is breaking laws.
Stopping crypto-mixing is much easier then stopping money laundering.
At some point, your internet crime ring will have to procure goods from the rest of the world. If the government wanted to crack down on it, they very easily could.
The underground drug markets only work because illegal drugs enjoy enormous profit margins (And because they are incredibly easy to conceal), due to lack of legal competition... And because, unlike crypto-currencies, cash transactions are common and untraceable (Which makes money laundering possible.) How is your illegal self-driving car company going to make those margins? How are they going to be able to afford to pay off all their suppliers (Who will charge a premium due to the legal risk), to keep your operations under wraps? How are you going to get customer to pay you, when it's illegal to drive your cars round town?
During prohibition, Al Capone was running moonshine, not beer. There weren't enough margins in beer, to risk federal prison. There aren't enough margins in <Whatever illegal bitcoin business you want to run, that doesn't involve a meth lab, or burning people alive in oil drums>, either.
You are right. This is why these things will not go anywhere. Ultimately they need some kind of "back up"... For example, the system we currently have flows like so: Nation state Military > Federal Police > Local Police > Physical Intimidation via face to face meeting. At every step, stop when lawyers and/or politicians get involved.
We already have well-established mechanisms to arbitrate these kind of disagreements, e.g. courts. Adding blockchains to the process just makes it more complicated for no gain.
Has no one addressed the basic need of a justice system with these crypto currencies?
Of course, this is entirely insufficient to do something like "put your corporation on the blockchain".
No reason an arbitration clause couldn't be included in the contract.
Ethereum contracts are turing complete. The payout function can be contingent on either the buyer or arbitrators releasing the funds. The arbitrators can be determined before hand or rely on an external contract that offers arbitration services. The possibilities are truly endless.
It might help if 'contracts' and payment amounts were small. In the Antifragile (book) sense: the fairness of any individual contract is fragile, rife with risk. However, in aggregation the system is antifragile (better than robust) as long as occasional bad deals are acceptable.
It's much easier to proscribe the possession of child porn, hand grenades, or heroin because it's easy to demonstrate the harm of allowing free traffic in such items. Prohibiting voluntary arrangements that don't inherently have first-order harm effects is more difficult. Thus there isn't much opposition to heroin remaining a controlled substance - junkie life sucks - but prohibitions on cannabis use are collapsing left and right because people can see that smoking weed is unlikely to wreck your life.
Of course I don't expect you to get familiar with my comment history, but I'm heard all these basic roadblocks to crypto currencies because I've made many of these same arguments myself in the past. The existence of unsolved problems does not mean that the problems are insoluble.
No, I'm saying that outside of drugs, assassinations, and moonshine in countries following Sharia law, there aren't large enough margins in anything to risk federal prison.
> Your whole argument relies on declaring crypto currency as contraband, but contraband items are popular because they have inherent value to the consumers rather than simply being a medium of exchange.
Crypto currency is not contraband - but if you are using crypto currency to run a contraband business, you can be shut down by applying pressure on the parties you transact with. The easiest way to do this is by going after the exchanges.
For example, if the feds really wanted to take away all of Ross Ulbricht's money, they could make it illegal for a BTC exchange to accept in payment a bitcoin that, after a particular point in time, ever touched the Silk Road wallet. This would have made his coins de-facto unspendable - and the feds have the ability to do that, given that the exchanges interface with the USD economy.
> It's much easier to proscribe the possession of child porn, hand grenades, or heroin because it's easy to demonstrate the harm of allowing free traffic in such items. Prohibiting voluntary arrangements that don't inherently have first-order harm effects is more difficult.
That's correct. However, we are discussing using a blockchain to run a company that 'can't be shut down'. What exactly would you be selling, that makes it worth the trouble?
There was a guy in my neighborhood who was a politician - first on the school board, then a city supervisor, then a state legislator. A real American success story - straight As in school, first from his community to succeed in getting elective office and worked very hard for his constituents, a guy who'd be outside the subway station at 6am during election season on his own to shake your hand and ask for your vote (which was the last time I met him in fact).
Anyway, he's currently sitting in federal prison for arms trading in automatic weapons and rocket-launchers which he bought from Islamic rebels in the Philippines and attempted to resell to the FBI. Why? Because under his pillar-of-the-community exterior, he secretly longed to live the life of a gangster/warlord and had dreams of disappearing off to the jungle to do it full time. I swear to you that I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.
Now for general adoption of a crypto currency you're right, most people don't want to deal with anything riskier than buying weed or driving on an expired license. But consider that it may only need a small number of people with a very different risk calculus to create a viable marketplace.
When I say crypto isn't contraband, I mean that people's attitude toward it is different. If you are caught with contraband lots of people will say 'tough, that contraband is illegal to possess for good reasons you bad person.' But if you are caught with illegal cryptocurrency that you acquired in some otherwise legal business activity (just getting paid in coin rather than $), that won't seem like that big of a moral issue to most people. That creates a problem for prosecutors, since jurors might choose not to convict.
That's correct. However, we are discussing using a blockchain to run a company that 'can't be shut down'. What exactly would you be selling, that makes it worth the trouble?
Nothing, necessarily. Suppose that rather than trafficking in goods my intention were to undermine existing currencies through legal competition. In a way the high utility of cryptocurrency for black-market transactions is a drawback because it delays popular adoption due to guilt by association. Then again, that's probably just as well while the technical and philosophical wrinkles are ironed out.
How long is the discovery period? What about "returns"? What if the arbitrator is working with the seller and scams me? When does "I have a big gun and I am not afraid to use it" come into the function?
> The arbitrators can be determined before hand or rely on an external contract that offers arbitration services.
And how much will those services cost? Who vets the arbitrator? What is my recourse if arbitration fails?
> The possibilities are truly endless.
Yes, I agree. This is just built for a place that does not yet exist.
> that brings on a whole new level of reputation-economy things you have to think about.
We already have an inscrutable, unaccountable, super-intelligent system that can do that - the courts, the police...
However when I tried some Ethereum development my impression was that most cryptocurrency people I met just hope that the value of their bitcoins goes up, or that they can sell related products or services. Many things seem to be financed by cryptocoin-money (not necessarily bad in itself) to keep the hype going, but it doesn't feel like a movement that wants to change things.
It's not like with open source where Stallman, Linus and many many other dreamt a dream but also built a lot of really high quality and important software. I don't see that kind of movement going on with Ethereum.
If an arbitration clause isn't held up, it's not because of unpredictability of the court it's because the clause runs afoul of the actual law/code the court applies which is predictable. Moreover, smart contracts are not going to permit parties to circumvent law, in other words a smart contract arbitration clause would not be enforceable in a jurisdiction they are not otherwise enforceable.